Michael Neumann posted a progress report on his webcam work for DragonFly. The short description is: it’s recognizing hardware but not recording yet. You can try it now.
Some BSD-specific links mixed in.
- Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium videos. Scroll right. (via)
- What The Internet Did To Garfield, a video. (via, via)
- RDAP is replacing WHOIS. (via)
- The Flywheel Spin Top.
- Netnews: The Origin Story. USENET, or nntp, if you prefer. (PDF, via)
- The NetBSD General Meeting is coming up on the 17th.
- A 55-year example of Moore’s Law.
- Hacker Laws. (via)
- TRMNL, which I might have linked to before, but two different people have told me they got it and love it recently.
- diff-jfk, a use I didn’t expect for diff. (Thanks, Paul)
- NumFOCUS concerns. “Linux Foundation: Voltron of Bureaucracy” is a funny section title. (also thanks, Paul)
- The History of Solaris. “UNIX is plural.” (PDF, via)
- The modern OpenBSD home router. (via)
- tinypod, turning an Apple Watch into an iPod. (via)
Your unrelated music video of the week: DRASS – Nucleation Point. Makes me think I need to start making my phone less useful. (via)
Michael Neumann proposed a lot of changes to crypto(9) and dm_target_crypt(4); his initial proposal is I think now complete and committed, other than that tcplay(8) was updated instead of removed. Here’s a sorted list of his commits. These are not in the 6.4.1 release.
6.4.1, a bugfix upgrade to 6.4, is ready to download. The commit log from 6.4.0 to 6.4.1 is available if you want the details.
Maybe I should add a ‘odd hardware’ category.
- “Open source is everything!“
- Epistemological Slop.
- Pomera DM250 Tinkering.
- MNT April 2025 Update. The handheld prototype is interesting.
- The DNS system isn’t a database and shouldn’t be used as one. “Lies in order to create truth” is one way to describe DNS.
- Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries and Poisoning Well and anticrawl. I am seeing multiple AI text poisoning tools being published, which gives an idea of the size of the problem. (first two via)
- A local perspective: roughly 15% of my traffic logs for the Digest in the past week contain the line “bot”, which is probably an undercount of actual activity. If I was running more heavyweight services this would definitely concern me.
- Poisonify, same but for music. (via)
- The Qwerkywriter.
- DOOM plus DOOM 2. I had no idea how many rewrites there were.
- Why is there a “small house” in IBM’s Code page 437? (via)
- Digital hygiene. (via)
- Don’t use AI for technical answers.
- If it hadn’t been C, what language would have been most common? Brian Kernighan’s answer.
- “What I Saw at the Evolution of Plan 9” by Geoff Collyer. Read the Closing Thoughts section at the end. (PDF, via)
Your unrelated music of the week: Keep Pushing from clipping. (via)
Aaron LI has made a whole lot of POSIXy updates to timeout(1), of which I think these two are the most informational, but there’s a bunch more if you look at the month. I’m also linking to it cause I didn’t know timeout(1) existed; never used it.
I have definite link overflow – I will start next week’s post now.
- Vim essence.
- “…when you blog, your words are not a vote for the values of someone else’s platform.” Why I keep doing this.
- ‘vibecoded’ saas are a privacy nightmare. (via)
- dated carbon.
- Who Uses To-Do Lists? Donald Knuth’s advice works well. (via)
- Gamer Games for Non-Gamers.
- “An off switch? She’ll get years for that.”
- How I set up VimWiki for notetaking. (via)
- The Curation Paradox. (via)
- The office in Severance is a historic Bell Labs building – where a lot of Unix work happened. Here’s some anecdotes about it.
- “Webster’s Second on the Head of a Pin” by Morris and Thompson. (via)
Mini bot/brute force attacks theme.
- The New Control Society. A very long essay. (via)
- Do Not Comply With the Terms of Service. I don’t necessarily agree with the arguments but the links at the end are useful. (via)
- Dormitorium: The Film Décors of the Quay Brothers.
- A different approach to blocking bad webbots by IP address
- and A deeper dive into mapping web requests via ASN, not by IP address
- and then Notes on blocking spam by filtering on ASN.
- Chunking attacks on Tarsnap (and others).
- A summary of my bot defence systems.
- Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face.
- And that leads to: iocane. (via)
- Why Choose to Use the BSDs in 2025. (via)
- KDE Plasma 6 on FreeBSD on Framework 13.
- FediMeteo.
- Designing A Portable Mac Mini. A fatmac is what it looks like to me.
Old home computers is the accidental theme this week.
- Home Assistant Voice. Runs standalone, but related to ESPHome.
- Necronomicon Ex Mortis, up for sale. (via)
- Clockwork PicoCalc. Kinda a toy but also fun.
- Box124: Design and the Construction of Imaginaries. Touches on a lot of topics I’ve linked to here before – but more descriptively. My favorite article this week.
- Haunted Machines, related.
- Free Media Heck Yeah. Some legit links, some pirate, so exercise caution. (via)
- Not Feeling Big Tech This Year? Start an Indie Blog! (via)
- Ultima III for the Vic-20. (via)
- Vic-20 Elite, same author. That’s not an easy fit!
- Four new patches for 2.11BSD released in March 2025!
- Booting A Desktop PDP-11.
Your unrelated music link of the week: Brutalist Riffs: A Guide to Math Rock.
No overriding theme this week, though several trends did start to crystallize.
- FediMeteo: How a Tiny €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service for Thousands. I like the low-resources aspect. (via)
- The HTML Review issue 3 and The HTML Review issue 4. Linked for the rotating table of contents / doorways table of contents; it’s neat. (via)
- this page is under construction. Read to the end for more links. (via)
- The Graphing Calculator Story, (via)
- “A calculator app? Anyone could make that.” (via)
- Manage UPS on FreeBSD. Linked cause it mentions how to turn off the beep.
- BSDCan 2025 registration is open.
- NarraScope registration is open too.
- The cleanest VAX you’ll ever see,
- Bolt Action, WWII minature gaming I’ve not seen before.
- A USB interface to the “Mother of All Demos” keyset. Borrowing one of Englebart’s original chorded keysets is the startling thing here.
A lessons learned week.
- Computer Science the Fun Way, a Humble Bundle. (via)
- Fight On! issue 16 is out. (via)
- FreeBSD and KDE Plasma generations. I think the right answer on versioning there.
- Patrick Collision’s bookshelf. (via)
- Framework 13 AMD Setup with FreeBSD. I could use a new laptop; this x220 is getting long in the tooth.
- Silicon Valley’s thing about Great Men, a followup on the previous source.
- Owning your own space and content is important.
- Make yourself less valuable to tech companies. The sheer number of things you can turn off that are just extractive data about you is a sort of wake-up call. (via)
- BBC Micro emulation directly in the browser. (via)
- If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling. And leave extra cable length when you pull; everyone gets to learn this the hard way.
Done early!
- Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook. For pre-order, and excerpts are available. I think this is a unique book; catch the limited print while you can. (via)
- Vim Spellcheck Cheat Sheet.
- NetBSD on Raspberry Pi!
- State of virtualizing the BSDs on Apple Silicon.
- From ACS to Altair: The Rise of the Hobby Computer.
- Walter Bright’s Classic Empire, Empire Deluxe, and original author Walter Bright. (incidentally, original available as a port/pkg/port)
- Standalone Digital Scratch Instrument.
- Debugging aids for pf firewall rules [on FreeBSD]. For reference.
- Free MWL excerpts/books. (via)
- If you’re going to GDC, there’s a Roguelike Celebration meetup on the 18th.
- UNIX advertisements. (via) From that page:
The remainder of my tab cleanout from last week.
- Blocko – Lego TC LOGO interface for Apple II. (via)
- The CRPG Renaissance, Part 3: TSR is Dead… I never knew these details.
- Good Movies as Old Books. The URL does not lie. (via)
- Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass | Clip | Quay Brothers. (Youtube, via)
- FreeBSD 13.5 Overcomes UFS Y2038 Problem To Push It Out To Year 2106. The first actual Y2038 fix I’ve heard of.
- If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well.
- Gamer Deep Lore, Exhibit #5. Star Fleet Battles. The format is similar to much-less-complicated Silent Death.
- Brick your phone, on purpose. (via)
- Captured Innovation: Technology Monopoly Response to Transformational Development. “Disruption” no longer applies to the large Internet companies. (via)
- Possibly the earliest runnable version of Unix?
Your unrelated link of the week: My Six-Point Plan To Help You Stop Living Mindfully And Enter A Constant State of “Living Sleep”. Ha ha ha wait.
I had to get some of my tabs closed, so here’s a dump of some of them. Still have 30 to get through.
- Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of ProVUE at MacWorld Expo! Rare to see software that started on a FatMac, still going. (via)
- Auto-Download Your Kindle Books Before February 26th Deadline. Makes the alternatives look better.
- The Perfect Pi Pico Portable Computer which led me to the more accessible DevTerm.
- Related: the Ink Console. Read all the way through for more story.
- The hardest working font in Manhattan. If you think that article’s in-depth, you should read the author’s book, Shift Happens – which I am halfway through.
- Post-Quantum Cryptography in February 2025. Short version: start preferring AES now and deprecate ECDSA.
- The Pocket Computer Museum. (via)
- Analog vs. Digital? Nah. PC vs. Hardware. (via)
I’ve mentioned it before, but custom live images are possible. Related: mkisofs(8) is no longer needed to build.
Some deeper reads.
- (mac)OStalgia. Mac OS 9 versions of software; accurate to the end. (via)
- The Mythology Index. (via)
- DIA Tools. (via)
- A Tiny Computer With A 3D Printed QWERTY Keyboard.
- PDP-11 computer system UNIX System file system.
- The History of S.u.S.E. Something I knew of but did not know.
- New Rust, Old Drama. Open source burnout is not new.
- This Week in Self-Hosted, via the previous link. A curated, updated list of self-hosted apps? This makes me happy.
- “ALGNOSTIC”, “MAILIVORE”.
- UNIX Magic poster annotations. (via)
- How to add a directory to your PATH. Not as straightforward as assumed.
- I never got the memo on “copyover servers”.
I almost maintain a theme all the way today.
- The origin and unexpected evolution of the word “mainframe”. 2 words.
- I Don’t Have Spotify. (via)
- Electromechanical computer from 1948 and hydromechanical computer, videos. (via)
- My stupid noise journey. I have done similar.
- Ambient computer research. (via)
- Stealth Macintosh Portable Case Mod. (via)
- Found at previous link: Macintosh Plus Exploded View shirt.
- The Internet Can’t Discover.
- Comics That Resemble The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan Album Cover. Swipes swipes swipes.
- A Closer Look at the Tanmatsu. My recurring fantasy of doing everything at a terminal somehow.
- Sorta related: Some Terminal Frustrations.
Your unrelated violent claymation fantasy movie link of the week: The Dead Need No Chairs.
I have some interesting art projects to point at, here.
- Programming Quotes. (via)
- The CRPG Renaissance, Part 1: Fallout. I didn’t know about the GURPS link.
- The first perfect computer. (via)
- Recommended File Formats for Digital Preservation. (via)
- My electric toothbrush was acting up, so I tried to reboot it.
- Also “I tried to adjust the time on my alarm clock. I failed.“
- Insert “I will pay extra to NOT have a computer in my fridge” meme here.
- The glory of the A4 paper size. Sorry about the link location though. (via)
- Hyper-Kinetic. “I have a pen plotter robot called Stephen”. (also via)
- Data Viz Project. (via)
- Amiga Hardcore. (also via)
- Then were the horsehoofs broken by the means of their pransings. Online reviews are a marketing tool, not a quality reference.
- Solid State Watch. Art project, but also definitely waterproof.
Got all the types this week.
- Semi Social / Streaming hardware test session for NYCBUG, this Wednesday.
- 2025 IGF nominees, quick takes.
- Five Centuries of Board Games.
- Plan 9 inspired programs. (via)
- The Monospace Web. Looks nice. (via)
- ELIZA followup. Hopefully you get the joke.
- Dragonsweeper. (via)
- The PC is Dead: It’s Time to Make Computing Personal Again.
- Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy.
- The truth about proprietary protocols.
- Which leads me to Pixelfed and Loops.
- Or, y’know, Tumblr.
- FACT 2025, which has a great speaker lineup. (via)
- The expanded Raiding the 20th Century turns twenty. “all copyright-infringement”.
- Narcissystem.
- Beginning Framework.
- Up Rye Zine.
Done quite early, but it cleared my tabs.
- A Retrospective on the Source Code Control System. SCCS, summarized by the guy who wrote it, 50 years later. (via)
- Coding font comparison, the game. (via)
- The new Public Domain Image Archive.
- “/bin/sh: the biggest Unix security loophole“. A more fun read than the format would lead you to believe. (via)
- The Visible Zorker. This is quite a gem.
- Can you complete the Oregon Trail if you wait at a river for 14272 years: A study. (via)
- What’s involved in getting a “modern” terminal setup? (via)
- a grep that doesn’t stuck. Not a typo.
- A tale from the time_t mines:
- Using tcpdump to see only incoming or outgoing traffic.
- What a FreeBSD kernel message about your bridge means.
Your unrelated music of the week: Tenebre Rosso Sangue by KEYGEN CHURCH.